Tape recovery from a whole raft of other tape types is provided by Altirium, whether it be from the 9-track half-inch open reel tapes of the 1970's and 1980's, or the latest Sun/StorageTek T10000 drives.
However reliable a type of tape or drive might be it is still a mechanical device and has the potential to go wrong resulting in physical damage to the recorded media, or data recording quality problems. Add to this the involvement of humans and then accidental overwrites and damage to the tape through accident can be added to the equation.
Altirium provide data recovery services from:
IBM Mainframe/Mid-range
IBM introduced tape cartridge drives in the early 1980s to supersede the open reel tapes that were common in use on mainframe systems. First came the 3480 18-track cartridge that increased storage from the maximum of about 140MB on 1.2 tape up to 300MB, and came in a case that was designed for use by robotic and auto-loading systems. The current development has moved on to the 3592/TS1120 and 1.4TB of storage per tape.
This range of drives is mostly used on AS/400 systems, z-Series mainframes and larger UNIX systems.
- 9-track 1/2" open reel
- 3480, 3490
- 3490e
- 3590 (3590B, 3590E, 3590H)
- 3592, TS1120
- 3570 (3570B, 3570C)
Sun/STK Mainframe/Mid-range
StorageTek produced IBM compatible tape drives before moving away to their own range with drives such as Redwood. Their 9840 range of fast access tape drives were popular on large systems for fast near-line data access, and they have been consistently at the leading each for capacity with their single-reel cartridge drives up to T10000B with 1TB per cartridge native storage, a probable 2TB with compression.
StorageTek is now owned by Sun. As with the IBM drives detailed above, this range of drives is mainly used on larger more expensive mainframe and UNIX systems.
- 9840 (9840A, 9840B, 9840C, 9840D)
- 9940 (9940A, 9940B)
- T10000 (T10000A, T10000B)
Quarter-Inch-Cartridge ( SLR )
Quarter Inch Cartridge (QIC), now known as SLR, was a leading technology of the 1980's into the 1990s. At one time there were several manufacturers producing media and drives (Archive, Wangtek, Sankyo) for this format, though the advent of 4mm DAT and DLT severely dented its market and now only Tandberg remain as a supplier.
The market for this type if drive was broad. The Tandberg QIC120 drive was the standard device on base level AS/400 systems (it had modified firmware to emulate variable block sized recording), but the relative low cost of the units compared with 1/2" drives also made them an economic choice for hight end PC and low end UNIX system backups.
DC2000, Travan
DC2000 was the underclass of the tape drive industry. reasonably rugged tape cartridges were used within low cost drives that had the "benefit" of not requiring an expensive controller. The drives connected to the diskette controller that already existed within the PC or low end UNIX system
The market leader in the late 1980s was Irwin with their Accutrak DC2000 format tapes. They were effectively ganged up upon by a posse of manufacturers led by Colorado Memory Systems and their "clip-together-mostly-plastic" Jumbo drive. This drive looked cheap, but when used with pre-formatted tapes was very reliable.
The format evolved with the tape being lengthened and widened to increase potential capacity, and the idea of using the diskette controller vanishing as performance improvements were required. The Imation led "Travan" format attempted to bring standards to the market area and succeeded for a while but the format has become caught from below by DVD and above by DAT
- DC2000, DC2040, DC2060, DC2120
- Irwin Rhomat
- MC3000, MC3080
- QICExtra
- TR1, TR2, TR3, TR4, TR5
- T20, NS20
DAT
4mm DAT was the success story of the 1990s. Evolving from Audio DAT, HP and SONY introduced the DDS standard for data recording and DAT was born as the low-end to mid-range leading format. Introduced with a format that was 2-3 times that of the highest capacity cartridge drive, market share was quickly seized though this was curtailed with the advent of DLT. The format is now mostly an HP product and has moved up to 8mm tape to keep abreast of increasing capacity requirements.
- DDS 60m and 90m
- DDS2, DDS3, DDS4, DAT72, DAT84
Exabyte & Mammoth
Exabyte launched the 8200 drive in the latter part of the 1980's heralding a massive increase in the available tape capacity over the then market leaders. The drive was basically a SONY Camcorder with a SCSI interface, though the drive became more sophisticated with the newer models that were introduced. The range of drives evolved though several versions ending with the Exabyte Mammoth 2. Caught between 4mm DAT and DLT the drive found its market share steadily eroded, eventually Exabyte was taken over by Tandberg.
- Exabyte 8200, 8205, 8205C
- Exabyte 8500, 8500C, 8505, 8700, Eliant
- Exabyte Mammoth, Mammoth 2
VXA
VXA is a current 8mm technology owned by Tandberg. Originally created by Ecrix, and Exabyte spin-off, then taken over by Exabyte. The drive uses a helical scan recording technique and a data organisation known as "packet-recording" which the technology claims gives greater reliability over other formats.
- VXA, VXA2
AIT, S-AIT
AIT is the flagship tape technology of SONY, along with SAIT (although SAIT is niche and there is not much of it about). AIT is an 8mm helical scan technology, and started out using the same media as did the original Exabyte Mammoth drive. AIT has worked through several iterations, we are now on AIT5, and sits firmly at the middle to high end of the server market, though some other older drives are still sold and targetted toward the lower end of the backup market.
- AIT, AIT2, AIT3, AIT4, AIT5
- SAIT, SAIT2
OnStream
OnStream was the "big-idea" that came about just as the mini-cartridge drive in the form of Travan was starting to decline. The tapes were relatively high capacity, the drives low cost, but despite some initially aggressive marketing it never caught on significantly and is now the stuff of Ebay.
Ditto
Iomedia's venture into the world of tape backup had quite a strong following in the home user/small business market. similar form factor to Onstream and QIC Extra the drives used pre-formatted cartridges and were supplied as diskette interfaced or parallel port.
DLT, SDLT
DLT evolved from the TK50 and TK70 DEC drives, and began life as the TK85. Using a multi-track serpentine recording format and 1/2" tape in a square cartridge that was ideally shaped for the tape autoloader market, DLT sat comfortable at the mid-ti-high end of the server backup market and could even challenge in the mid-range to mainframe market. Rapid increases in capacity kept it ahead of any potential rivals until the advent of LTO which prevented Super DLT really catching on.
- TK50, TK70, TK85, TK86 (sometimes known as TZ30, TZ85, TZ86)
- DLT2000, DLT2000XT, DLT4000, DLT7000, DLT8000
- SDLT (220GB), SDLT320, SDLT600, SDLT1.2
Tape Data Recovery
Each of these formats poses a range of different challenges when it comes to tape data recovery. even within a family of drives the issues can change between different versions. Problems relating to the recovery of dtaa from re-intitialised DLT cartridges change drastically between the DLTIII and DLTIV, and DDS3 DAT virtually wiped out a lot of the recording tracking issues that had bedevilled some of the DDS2 manufacturers. Altirium's tape data recovery engineers have recovered data from each of these types of data cartridges and a few more to boot, and are available 24 hours of every day to advise as the the likely cause of your tape problem and what can realistically be dome about it.
